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Every developer knows they should be building unit tests and performance tests but sometimes it is just too hard to get started from nothing. Well now SugarCRM Engineering is going to make it easy for you!

The Sugar 7 unit test suite and performance test frameworks that we use to develop Sugar 7 are now available to current customers and partners via Github!

This is the first release in a new effort to provide enhanced standardized development tooling and automation to the Sugar Developer community.

At this time, we are only releasing these tools to existing Sugar Customers and Sugar Partners. So these private Github repositories require that you are logged in using your Github account in order to access them. You may also need to request access from SugarCRM if you cannot access these repositories currently.

In the coming weeks, we will be posting step-by-step tutorials for creating Sugar 7 unit tests and custom JMeter scenarios. So stay tuned!

All you Sugar Developers and Sugar Administrators will like the Actions feature which allows you to quickly run many actions from anywhere in the application. Administrators additionally get easy access to many administrative functions through Sweet Spot.

There are actually several more features that we haven’t shown here. But we will leave the rest for you guys to discover on your own!

Plans for this feature are still evolving but we think it will ultimately grow into an exciting addition to the Sugar user experience. Try it out today in any Sugar 7.6 instance!

In our previous “Hello World” dashlet post, we established what a minimal dashlet entailed. In these next post, we’ll be building on those skills to create a more useful dashlet that takes advantage of Sugar 7 List Views. We will be creating a dashlet for Cases that binds to the list’s Collection and sums the number of Cases by their status. So if the Cases list contains 5 records, and 3 of those are in “New” state and 2 are in “Closed” state then we want our dashlet to display “New: 3″ and “Closed: 2″. To the code!

File Structure

Again, using what we learned in the previous post, we’re going to create a folder in custom/clients/base/views/ called “case-count-by-status“. Inside that folder you should create 3 files:

case-count-by-status.php

case-count-by-status.js

case-count-by-status.hbs

You should have something that looks like the following screenshot:

While technically optional, we will also utilize the Language extension in order to provide multilingual support for our example dashlet. This extension file will be located at custom/Extension/application/Ext/Language/en_us.case-count-by-status.php.

For Sugar Developers, the Dashboard and Dashlet framework provided in Sugar 7 really helps you to build slick reusable Dashlets that can be targeted for certain parts of the app or made globally available anywhere in the app. They’re also really easy to use which is something we are gonna highlight today.

For a more detailed look at how Sugar 7 Dashlets work then you should read up on the topic in the Sugar Developer Guide. The focus on this post is to highlight the most basic elements necessary that we can then build upon in later posts.

A quick reminder

Just some quick advice to anyone about to embark on the Dashlet development journey. We recently featured a post on a common Sugar 7.x dashlet gotcha. Basically, dashlet metadata gets copied into database when you add a dashlet to a dashboard. You’ll need to delete the dashlet or the dashboard and add it all over again whenever you modify dashlet metadata. We are working on making this seamless in future but this is something you should remain aware of when building dashlets.

Creating a Dashlet Summarized

Dashlets are simply Sugar 7 Views that have some extra features added via the ‘Dashlet’ plug-in and an additional metadata requirement. This tutorial will be brief because creating a basic dashlet is incredibly easy. As with any Sugar 7 view, we will need three files: a JS controller, a PHP metadata file, and a Handlebars template for the presentation.

If you were at UnCon in April 2015 then you know that one of our hottest topics was plans for a SugarCRM Mobile SDK. Since mobile devices and mobile use cases are such a key part of what Customer Relationship Management and Customer Experience is today and will be in the future, we are planning to enhance the SugarCRM Mobile development platform available to Sugar Developers. You can follow the blog here for updates on that as they become available in the future.

However, there are already many different ways that developers can customize the behavior of the existing SugarCRM Mobile application today. That will be the focus of today’s post. In fact, you can drastically customize the behavior of the SugarCRM Mobile application without the hassle of having to distribute any custom code or apps to end-user Mobile devices. All these techniques listed below involve only Sugar 7 server side code and metadata customizations.

In last week’s post on the Font Awesome 4.x upgrade in Sugar 7.6 we mentioned that Sugar Engineering has been putting together a compatibility package. This package can be installed into Sugar 7.6 instances to add Font Awesome 3.2.1 back.

That package is now ready. It can be installed into Sugar 7.6 Beta or Sugar 7.6 GA once that is available.